Driving on the Rim (39 page)

“Broccoli.”

“I hate broccoli.”

“Spinach.”

“Hate that too. “Parsley.”

“I throw it on the floor. If I avoid all of those, can I have the booze and beef back?”

“In moderation. This is warfarin. It’s like rat poison.”

“Why do doctors hate lawyers?”

“It’s one of nature’s laws. Now, if you have any sort of unusual bleeding, I want to know about it. I mean like when you’re flossing your teeth. Niles, I want you take this seriously so you can avoid surgery.”

“Berl, let me tell you how seriously I’m taking this: I’m retiring. And not just to avoid seeing Maida’s face or hearing her baleful screeches
when a bit of work is required of her. The record shows that I took my job seriously but I never took myself seriously. That’s why I am not a judge like that ignoramus Lauderdale. A lawyer wishing to become a federal judge like slime king Lauderdale does not turn his own home into a notorious fornicatorium. I’m going to get off this rat poison if it’s the last thing I do. I’m going fishing. You and me, we started out as fishing boys, but we strayed. I’m going back. I may have sex occasionally, but I assure you it will be with a girl who if she moves at all moves very little.”

I acted as a go-between for Alan, whose patient Niles really was. It preserved the relationship Niles insisted on having with me and allowed him to conceal his terror of death with the familiar jocularities that had always marked our relationship. He would have felt emotionally naked with anyone else, a state Niles could hardly face. I never gave Niles bad medical advice, I gave him Alan Hirsch advice, which was meticulous, cutting-edge cardiological guidance, guidance which Niles declined to follow. The last time I ever saw him was the middle of the day; he was in his pajamas, mildly drunk; he held up a large can to my view, said, “With this I can glue anything.” He was dead in less than three months, enduring his last myocardial infarction at over eighty miles per hour in the big Audi, Gladys Knight on the sound system and a bottle of champagne on the passenger seat. The woman he must have been on his way to see never, as they say in the papers, came forward. Alan did not take this as a failure on his part, offering the opinion that Niles died not of heart disease but of priapism. Parenthetically, when I next saw Judge Lauderdale he seemed quite saddened by the death of Niles Throckmorton. “We always had such fun,” said Judge Lauderdale. “He’d say terrible things about me to my face and I’d try to do the same back. But I was never in Niles’s league. He was very creative. I bet he’s making them sweat up there.”

Lauderdale did not mention my case. Was it possible he’d forgotten that I was on his docket? Was he too polite? Did he think I was innocent? Did he not care? Did he think a nice guy like me was guilty as hell and it was all just too bad? It hardly mattered: Niles had handed me on to a smart young guy just out of Northwestern Law who “blew away the Montana Bar exam” and who Niles thought was his brand-new best
friend. But the young lawyer, Donald Sanchez, looked at my situation and dryly remarked, “Throckmorton must have enjoyed your company,” adding, “Oh, well, this is where you should have been headed in the first place. I hope he didn’t charge you.”

I was about to send Counselor Sanchez on his way. “There wasn’t time for him to charge me. He died. And he was my friend. And he sent me to you with his highest recommendation.”

“I’m sorry, but if he was a friend he should have told you more about his relationship with the victim.”

I was stunned. “Was there one?” I asked.

“Two night owls in a small town? You need to get your head in the game.”

Sanchez prepared for the dismissal hearing with a fistful of affidavits, the gist of which was that my colleagues found me gifted but erratic, someone who, despite the quality of his work, created an atmosphere of possible malpractice. Sanchez said that Wilmot had gotten to every one of them except Alan Hirsch and Jinx Mayhall.

I spent a very long evening in my basement going through old papers and documents until I found what I was looking for, a large, yellowing envelope that I carried on my visit to Judge Lauderdale, who saw me in his office with a look of skeptical surprise. I sat down after handing him the envelope. Judge Lauderdale put on a pair of glasses and emptied the contents of the envelope onto his desk. “What is this?” he said after a short time. “A bunch of receipts for paint and supplies?”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

“For painting your cabin in Harlowton.”

Judge Lauderdale removed his glasses and placed them on the desk in front of him. “Was that you?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“My God.” He laughed. “You were just a green kid. Now look at you!”

“Time flies.”

“I have to admit, you didn’t do much of a job. Lots of overruns.”

“You never paid me.”

“Like I said, it wasn’t like Leonardo da Vinci.”

“Your secretary thought it was a big improvement.”

“Oh?”

Whatever change I may have induced in Judge Lauderdale was unclear to me until Sanchez called me in with his helplessly imperious manner. I didn’t know whether he had learned this at Northwestern or it was just his nature, but his no-nonsense style took some getting used to. His first words were, “Sit down.” His office had none of the upholstered quality of my late friend Niles Throckmorton’s ordered lair. In fact, it appeared that the vertical stacks of paper on the floor and against the wall were ongoing cases or some sort of filing system. I’d have bet that he scared the daylights out of blustering Judge Lauderdale.

He said, glancing at his watch with a look of suppressed fury, “Let me give you the boiled-down finding on the frivolity to which you have been subjected, which at this point, we hope, is little more than toxic residue. Judge Lauderdale is now apprised of the following: misleading representation by previous counsel resulting from said counsel’s undisclosed relationship with the deceased, Tessa Larionov. Complicity of clinic staff with the intentions of board chairman Wilmot, placing one and all in the line of culpability for a defamation of character suit. Putting the crosshairs on their wallets, I found the good doctors’ views softening abruptly. This won’t go away—and should you feel vindictive and wish to get rich, call me. Credit to you for softening up Lauderdale in your unauthorized private meeting. Not interested in the details. Long story short, all momentum from your adversaries has dissipated. I have nothing more for you. I’ve got to be in Helena in two hours. Should you wish to stay here and collect your thoughts, the coffee machine is in the john. Pull the door shut when you leave, it locks itself and I have a key. Congratulations, you’re innocent.”

I didn’t think so. Sanchez threw all his papers into a satchel and, running his fingers through his thick black Mexican hair, turned and went on his way.

I had to do something about my real crime. My so-called innocence had no more than isolated the problem. I arranged to meet Cody’s mother, Deanne. I am not exaggerating when I say that I suffered over this one. When I finally went to see her, I thought, Here goes nothing, just more
whistling in the dark. I was well aware that I might not have the nerve to tell her how I had encouraged Cody on his way, but I had to do this or I would never be free. And was that it? Freedom? The cemetery was the safest place to meet, as she believed that we would start rumors if we were seen together. “People will think we’re getting it on.” This inappropriate tone made me understand with a sinking feeling how little she suspected what I really had in mind. Nor could she know how much I was my mother’s son in the quest for forgiveness and the desire to be shriven.

Where the walkways separated, a pleasant bower of green ash encircled three wrought-iron benches, virtual hemorrhoid machines in any season but summer. Here I awaited Deanne, pronounced “Dee Anne,” who arrived on time, rather dressed up and wearing the emphatic eyeliner I had always associated with availability. But the long, hard years shone through the makeup and gave me the sense that I was speaking to two people, one just behind the other.

“How old would Cody be?” I asked. I thought to go to my subject straightaway. She gave me an inquiring look.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m not quite sure why I asked.”

“I’m not either. Can we sit over there?”

“Oh sure, of course, I didn’t even see it.” A plank bench put us a little more face-to-face than I wished. We sat down. I looked at my shoelaces and Deanne looked at the treetops. I knew she would soon say something and she did.

“Before I married Jerry I was running around pretty hard. I had a bad reputation and, who can say, I probably deserved it. When it hit bottom I got to be pretty good friends with your old flame Tessa—”

“—well, she wasn’t exactly—”

“—a very special person, a very spiritual person.”

I listened closely. I felt panic: I didn’t come here to talk about Tessa. I hardly thought of Tessa as a spiritual individual, whatever in God’s name that was, though it was a concept much in currency, with little sign of going away. I knew from experience that “spirituality” was producing some ghastly scenes around the dinner tables of North America, and here it was, in the air again.

She went on. “Tessa told me she had done everything in her power to have your baby, but it was just not to be.”

“No, no. Oh, no.”

“So there was very strong feeling from that end.”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“And maybe, who knows, from your end too.”

“Well—”

“Well what?”

“Well, I was pretty young.”

“Are you trying to wriggle out of this?”

“Not at all!”

“What I’m leading up to is, is there anything to all this stuff I’m hearing? Isn’t that why you asked me to come here?”

“I’m not sure what you’ve been hearing, Deanne.”

“That you did away with Tessa on your operating table.”

“They’re looking into that.”

“For Christ’s sake, don’t you have an opinion?”

“I do but—yes, I do.”

“Want to share it?” she asked. Clearly she could make no sense of me at all.

“No, Deanne, I do not,” I said but thought, Maybe afterwards.

“Well, I have no clue why you wanted to talk to me, then. I thought you knew Tessa and I were friends. I thought you might come clean. In fact, I told somebody, ‘I’ll bet that quack is gonna spill the beans to the only friend Tessa had in this town.’ ”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

“You got a light?”

She had a cigarette in her mouth. I slapped my pockets futilely. She was plainly agitated; looking right and left, she said, “If you come on to me I’m going to scream my lungs out.” I’d seen two men strolling down the diagonal toward the First World War monument and I ran them down, two startled older men, and got a match for Deanne. She bent over my cupped hands to light the cigarette but kept wary eyes on me.

“Look, Deanne, Clarice was my patient. I took care of her after a lot of bad beatings—” She blew the smoke off to one side, then seemed to look
where it went. “I could have just treated her, left it at that, but it kept on and I got involved.”

“What d’you mean, you got involved?”

“I got caught up in what I thought was heading for tragedy.”

“Oh.”

“So, there at the end I was in that house, and she was, well, she was—I couldn’t really do anything for her.”

“I know the story.”

“I’m afraid you don’t, Deanne.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, I’m afraid you don’t know the story. Not all of it. Not about Cody.”

“I wonder if I need to hear any more of your story,” she said levelly. “I live with a man who said ‘good riddance’ when my son died. I don’t have a knack for a lot more of this.”

I was afraid she’d jump up and leave, but I had to finish. “Just one more thing, Deanne. You see, Cody wasn’t really going to do away with himself.”

It was time for me to take a stand. I just wasn’t sure I could.

“Oh?”

“No, I really don’t think so.”

“So what happened?” I was, in a way, frightened by the quiet way she asked because I knew it was the end of the line. “Are you going to tell me something?”

“He was there with, uh, with the gun, and I could see that the whole thing had dawned on him—”

That was true. Cody had been in a rage for a long time and now it was gone and he couldn’t get it back. He was alone, kind of weightless. There was in his face a bleak sort of amazement. He was mine and I knew it. I was his god. In the long years I’d had to think about it, that was what I had come up with: that I was the cold unblinking god of Cody.

“I felt very strongly that I knew what had to happen and that Cody didn’t and that Cody was waiting to hear it from me.”

“And what?”

I made myself look straight in her eyes. “I told him to kill himself.”

“You did.”

“I thought that was right.”

“And so he did.”

“Yes.”

She froze for a moment, then screamed and tried to put the cigarette out in my eye. I felt her claw down both sides of my face as she cried and screamed at once. She was not very strong, and I was able to get my arms around her and subdue her until she gasped that she would stop, she would calm down, and she would stop. I released her carefully. Her makeup was smeared crazily across her face, and in her expression I beheld such forlornness, such despair, that I felt as vacant as Cody had looked when he saw what he had done.

“Okay,” she said, “okay. Let me just get a grip here—” She pulled back on the bench and took a heavy breath. Then she fished underneath for her purse, which she put in her lap. “Let me just pull myself together here—” She started to get something from her purse, then covered her face and sobbed, the tears running out between her fingers. I could only think what a terrible price I was exacting for my own cheap absolution. She uncovered her eyes and said, “Okay, okay,” and got a Kleenex from the purse and dabbed and wiped her face carefully. She folded the Kleenex and tucked it back into the purse, pulling it open to look inside.

I didn’t realize what she was doing until she had stabbed me. I moaned and fell off the bench grasping the knife handle at my chest with both hands. Deanne stood over me and said she hoped I didn’t make it. I honestly didn’t know how much time I might have; whatever it might have been, I used it to tell her that I was innocent. She said that I had picked a bad time to lie, and walked away.